Re: More (probably) silly questions
Posted: Mon Jun 01, 2026 1:58 am
I think all the actual AI behaviour is hard-coded, and moreover I don't think anyone actually understands it. My understanding is that the current AI code was practically all written by one guy years ago, and he's no longer involved in freeciv development, and no one else really knows how it works.
The effects files just let you apply limitations or bonuses to AI players, based on their difficulty level. This can indirectly affect their behaviour, but doesn't directly control it.
For example civ2civ3, when it first became the default ruleset, completely broke the Hard AI. Easy worked as well as it ever did, but Hard AIs would just stall out fairly early in the game and never advance. Like, the last civ2civ3 game I played with Hard AI, at the point where I hit the Singularity (as a Monarchy!), my closest competitors were two AIs who had been "working" on Chemistry for decades, and that was only because I'd given one of them Medicine as humanitarian gesture, and the other had stolen it from them. Other than that, there were two AIs working on Feudalism. The rest of them hadn't made it out of the Bronze Age. Some of them hadn't made it into the Bronze Age. Most of them were still missing first-tier techs.
I did some poking around and determined that this was because there was an effect that removed the government tax rate caps for Hard AIs. And civ2civ3 changed unit support so some of the early governments were supporting units with Gold. And this meant that AIs would get into fights with their neighbors, start cranking out units, then crank up their tax rates to support all the units they were building, until their tax rate was at 100% Gold, which was all immediately being spent on unit support, their scientific advancement ground to a complete stop, and ultimately they were still having wars by just throwing hordes of Warriors and Archers at each other while I was building my starship.
Later releases restored the tax rate caps, and the Hard AI started functioning normally again, not because what it actually wanted to do or was trying to do had changed, but just because it was no longer allowed to paperclip-maximize so hard that it stalled its own progress.
The effects files just let you apply limitations or bonuses to AI players, based on their difficulty level. This can indirectly affect their behaviour, but doesn't directly control it.
For example civ2civ3, when it first became the default ruleset, completely broke the Hard AI. Easy worked as well as it ever did, but Hard AIs would just stall out fairly early in the game and never advance. Like, the last civ2civ3 game I played with Hard AI, at the point where I hit the Singularity (as a Monarchy!), my closest competitors were two AIs who had been "working" on Chemistry for decades, and that was only because I'd given one of them Medicine as humanitarian gesture, and the other had stolen it from them. Other than that, there were two AIs working on Feudalism. The rest of them hadn't made it out of the Bronze Age. Some of them hadn't made it into the Bronze Age. Most of them were still missing first-tier techs.
I did some poking around and determined that this was because there was an effect that removed the government tax rate caps for Hard AIs. And civ2civ3 changed unit support so some of the early governments were supporting units with Gold. And this meant that AIs would get into fights with their neighbors, start cranking out units, then crank up their tax rates to support all the units they were building, until their tax rate was at 100% Gold, which was all immediately being spent on unit support, their scientific advancement ground to a complete stop, and ultimately they were still having wars by just throwing hordes of Warriors and Archers at each other while I was building my starship.
Later releases restored the tax rate caps, and the Hard AI started functioning normally again, not because what it actually wanted to do or was trying to do had changed, but just because it was no longer allowed to paperclip-maximize so hard that it stalled its own progress.